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The trouble began with
a mortgage, which shouldn’t be taken lightly any more than a
marriage. And if any of you think marriage should be taken
lightly—well, you’ll find out, that’s all. That’s the whole
moral of the story right there, really, but since people generally
prefer the story to the moral, I suppose I’d better let you have
the whole thing.

I wasn’t the
principal player in it, but if it hadn’t of been for me none of it
would have happened, which is saying something. There’s lots of
fellows whose names don’t get into the history books, but if they
hadn’t been there at the other fellow’s elbow at the right
moment, the world would have—well, either have missed out on
something sensational or been spared a lot of grief, I don’t know
which. I’ll leave it to you to decide what I contributed.

There had to be a woman
in the case, of course. Search for a female, as the French say.
Meredith Fayett didn’t even look grown-up enough to be called a
woman the first time I saw her. That was in—oh, ninety-seven or
ninety-eight, a few years before the story really begins. Before the
Maine blew up. She was just a bit of a girl with red-gold hair
and a pretty smile who used to come down from St. Louis with her aunt
for a few weeks in the summer. The old lady owned the Fayett ranch,
which didn’t fit her too well—it let in too much fresh air at the
seams—but that wasn’t her fault because it had come to her from a
late older brother she didn’t get along with. But her niece liked
the outdoors and she liked her niece, so she endured the outdoors.
The ranch was a nice little place—small, I’ll grant, but it had a
white frame house with creeping vines all over the front porch, and
grew good crops of imported cattle and native alfalfa. Not a
showpiece, but the barns didn’t leak and the house had been brought
up to date with an icebox and screen doors and such.

Well, when the old lady
died of a surplus of years the ranch came to Meredith Fayett. She
came to the ranch about a month later, since she had always preferred
it to St. Louis, and set right in learning how to manage the place.
She learned quick and didn’t pester the lives out of us with
foolish questions, neither. There was half a dozen of us working
there, and during the old lady’s time we’d been mostly left to
our own devices, though since the last foreman left Chance Stevens
had been more or less in charge. We all thought for a lady boss,
Meredith Fayett was all right—before long there wasn’t a one of
us who wouldn’t have stood on his head if he thought it would do
her some good.

She ended up asking
for something a little more difficult.

One day when she’d
been at the ranch for a couple of months, the banker in Culver’s
Corners asked her to drop by his office. When she got there she found
it wasn’t to take afternoon tea but to hear some startling
financial facts. It seems a city lawyer had had the job of juggling
her aunt’s investments and shares and salaries by long distance,
and neither he nor Aunt had bothered much with the ranch. The brother
beforehand had left the place mortgaged to the neck, and the Aunt
preferred to spend as little of her income as possible on paying it
off. So Banker Ross explained to Meredith Fayett that if she couldn’t
put a lump sum on those back-payments right off, she’d lose the
place in about a week.

I could tell she had
something bothering her when she got back from town. She’d really
come to love that place, and the idea of it going at auction wasn’t
a pleasant one. She’d ridden to town and back, and she gave her
horse to one of the boys to take care of and walked over to the
house, twisting her quirt in her hands and wearing a little frown
that was almost as pretty as her smile. She went up on the front
porch, which ran along the front of the house and round the corner,
and walked along it slowly till she came abreast of where Chance
Stevens and I were unsaddling our horses near the yard pump on the
other side of the railing. It’s something to think, you know, that
if we’d unsaddled in the barn that day I might not be telling this
story at all. Just goes to show you it’s the little things that
count after all.

She wasn’t looking at
us to begin with; we were just there; but then her eyes widened a
little like she’d got an idea, and it was Chance her eyes were on.
I don’t know why she picked him. All the boys were pretty decent
upstanding fellows. I suppose it was because he was young and fairly
good-looking, while the rest of us were over thirty and there wasn’t
any artist who was going to ask to paint our pictures.

I could tell that
whatever idea had come to her, it was the kind that scares you a
little at first, because it’s so big you wonder how you could be
the one to think of it. Then her face changed so I could see she was
getting used to it, getting to the point where you begin to think it
might actually work. It’s right about then that some people just
blurt it out, before they’ve had a chance to think it over a second
time and have second thoughts. That’s what Meredith did.

She put her hands on
the railing and leaned over it. “Chance, could you do me a favor?”

He looked up quick and
smiled at her. “Sure, Miss Meredith. What’s the trouble?”

“Would you—could
you marry me?”

Chance was just bending
down on the other side of his horse as she spoke, and he popped up
and gave her a look across the saddle to make sure he’d heard what
he thought he did. “What?”

“Well, not really. I
mean, yes, really. But it wouldn’t be—I mean, you wouldn’t have
to—” She turned about as pink as a June rose and stuck for a
minute.

“Miss Meredith, are
you—are you feeling all right?” said Chance, looking at her kind
of concerned, and you couldn’t blame him.

“Oh, yes, I’m all
right,” she said, smiling and looking a little embarrassed. “But
I’ve got to be married before next Friday or I’m going to lose
the ranch.”

That didn’t sound any
saner to me. But Meredith Fayett was dead in earnest. She got up on
the porch rail and sat there with her back to the post and explained
it all, and Chance leaned his folded arms over his saddle and
listened to her. She made an awfully pretty picture perched up there
with the greenery hanging down behind her, swinging one little
riding-boot back and forth as she talked. She looked like a sweet
innocent little girl, and let me tell you, there had to be a fair
amount of little girl left in any woman who could make a proposal
like this and make it seriously.

“I never knew this
property was mortgaged until recently. My father left me some money
in trust that would help pay it off, but I can’t touch the capital
until I come of age or marry. The interest isn’t enough to pay
what’s due on the mortgage—and I won’t be twenty-one for six
months. So I thought—if I could find someone to marry me—only on
paper, you understand. I only thought I’d ask you, but of course
you needn’t do it if you’d rather not. I just thought…”

She stopped, and
sighed. I suppose she thought it was really too ridiculous and the
ranch was as good as gone—and I agreed with her. The story of the
pretty girl who’s going to lose the ranch is as old as barbed wire,
but this adaptation was a new one on me and not likely to catch on
with the public.

Chance pushed his hat
back on his forehead. He was the sort who grasps things much too
quickly—you know, the ones who can blurt out the answer to the
arithmetic problem before you’ve got through reading it—which had
frustrated me many a time before. But when he spoke I inwardly
blessed my comparative slow-wittedness. Better slow than sorry, as
the saying goes.

He said, “Well, no—I
understand. I’d like to help you if I can…”

“It would only be for
a few months,” said Meredith hopefully, “and it wouldn’t really
mean anything. Unless—unless there’s another girl, or
something of that sort—”

“No—no,” said
Chance, looking almost as embarrassed as she did.

“And you needn’t
worry about losing your job here. I suppose you can come back and
work here just the same after you’ve abandoned me.”

“Hold up. When did I
do that?” said Chance.

“That’s what’s
required in order to get an annulment, afterwards,” said Meredith.
“It’s a legal term,” she added, the way people do when they’re
not quite sure what something means themselves.

She added hesitantly,
“I could make it worth your while—if you’d like a raise in your
pay, or—”

That did it. Chance was
the high-spirited, sensitive kind that get offended when you mention
money within a day’s march of something personal, and marriage is
nothing if not personal. He stiffened up right away, frowning. “The
last time I did somebody a favor I didn’t ask to get paid for it,”
he said shortly. “I don’t want any money. I’ll do it. I’m
glad to help you out.”

“Oh, thank you,”
she said, breaking into that smile of hers, and you could tell that
even though she’d been too shy to push a delicate question like
proposing marriage to a fellow, she really wanted to keep that ranch.
Chance brightened up like a mirror when you smile into it, and I
couldn’t blame him for that, either. Meredith’s smile was more
worth seeing than whatever most people meet there.

“When do you want to
do it?” he asked.

She gave it a second’s
thought. “Well, would tomorrow do? I want to take care of those
payments as soon as I can. Tomorrow afternoon?”

“All right by me. Any
time you say.”

All this time I’d
been close by, watching like I was at a performance, and not entirely
sure it wasn’t an opera of some kind by how improbable it
was. Once Meredith Fayett had gone into the house I got out of the
audience and let Chance Stevens have it good.

“I’ve witnessed
some colossal pieces of impulse in my time,” said I, “but this
one takes the cake. And I had you figured for a smart kid. I’ll bet
you didn’t know that,” I added, which was probably true. I don’t
believe in flattery.

Chance looked at me
blankly, like he’d forgotten I was there, which he probably had.
That happened sometimes when Meredith and I were both in the
vicinity. Then he gave me a funny patronizing smile, like a man does
whenever he’s mixed up with a woman and feels like he knows more
about her than you ever could, and shrugged. “Aw, it’s nothing
much.”

“You’re the first
man I ever heard describe marriage as ‘nothing much’.”

Chance only laughed at
me. “But Marty, it isn’t really marriage,” he said.
“Didn’t you hear anything she said? It’s just on paper.”

“I’ve got ears, and
I’ve got eyes, and I’m reasonably sure I’ve got brains,” said
I. “I admit no bachelor can be rightly regarded as an expert on
matrimony, even if he’s a minister, because his expertness doesn’t
even extend as far as the honeymoon, which is a poor example in
itself. But—”

“What are you talking
about?” demanded Chance, who had been left even further behind than
the marriage license, judging from the look on his face. I wondered
how I could ever have appraised anyone who could look that foolish as
a ‘smart kid.’

“Suffering
sassafras!” said I, out of patience. “Listen here, Chance. I come
from a large family, with plenty of women in it. Nine aunts and
uncles—I mean nine pairs of them—besides my own folks, not to
mention girl cousins and so on. I’m not against the married state,
but I can say from secondhand experience it’s nothing to go into
with your eyes shut and your hands tied behind your back.”

Chance didn’t seem to
care. He just laughed again as he loosened the cinch and slid the
saddle off his horse. “I told you, it’s not really
marriage, the way we’re doing it.”

I shook my head.
“Marriage is marriage, no matter how many times you two keep saying
‘not really’ like it’s some kind of hocus-pocus.”

“Oh, shut up,” said
Chance good-naturedly. “I’m doing a lady a favor, that’s all;
I’m not going to get in trouble. She’s square; she’ll do like
she said and it’ll all be over in a few months.”

“It’s too good to
be true,” I said gloomily, as I pulled the headstall over my
horse’s ears. “I’m no legal or matrimonial expert, but
you mark my words, sonny boy, there’s going to be a catch in it
somewhere.”

Which there was, of
course, though it wasn’t at all what I expected it to be.

Chapter
2: Clinching the Deal

Having seen the first
act, I made sure I was on the spot when the curtain went up on the
second one. You see, at this point I still thought it was free
admission…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, it wasn’t
hard for me to tag along when Chance Stevens and Meredith Fayett rode
into Culver’s Corners together the next afternoon. We didn’t look
much like a wedding party. She had on her riding togs with the middy
blouse and tie and the wide-brimmed hat she always wore outdoors, and
Chance the same old blue shirt he wore every day—and me, I never
was one for formal attire even on special occasions.

We reined up in front
of the Justice of the Peace’s little office. “You’d better come
in, Marty; we might need you for a witness,” said Chance as we
dismounted.

“I’m not prepared
to stand the damages if the deal falls through,” said I, “but
I’ll come along and lend moral support. You’ll need it.”

“Oh, shut up,” he
said, friendly as ever.

The Justice of the
Peace was a fat bald little man with cheeks like apples and fingers
like sausages. Taken altogether he’d have kept a whole tribe of
cannibals happy for a week. He was a cheerful kind of creature too;
he greeted Meredith like a long-lost daughter. She explained that
she’d come to be married.

“Oh, then you’ve
found one!” said the Justice of the Peace.

It seems the Justice of
the Peace had foregathered with Banker Ross shortly after the man of
money delivered his broadside to Meredith, and Ross had told him how
Meredith needed to take a matrimonial partner into the firm by Friday
or go bust—to prepare him for a visit at Thursday midnight if the
search went down to the wire, I suppose. The Justice, who you might
say had both a friendly and a professional interest in the case, was
happy to find she’d succeeded.

“Well, shall we get
down to business?” he said, rubbing his fat hands together and
looking at Chance and me. “Which one of them is it?”

I withdrew myself from
the running and retreated to a chair by the wall that offered a good
view; in the dress-circle, you might say. The J. of the P. gets out a
paper and busies himself with officialness. “Your full names,
please.”

“Chance Alexander
Stevens,” says the aforementioned a little stiffly.

(“Alexander!” says
I to myself with a chuckle.)

“Meredith Clarice
Fayett,” said she, quiet and cool. She’d begun to look a little
pale and starry-eyed, just as if it was the real thing. To a woman a
wedding is a wedding, with or without the trimmings.

The J. of the P.
arranged himself behind the desk with his little book in both hands
while they stood side by side opposite, and he sort of threw back his
head and puffed out his chest and commenced reading in a pompous
voice, enjoying every second of it. “Dearly beloved, we are
gathered here today to join together this man and this woman in holy
matrimony. You may now kiss the bride.”

Chance and the girl
both kind of jumped and threw a scared look at each other. The J. of
the P. gave a foolish giggle. “Oh, excuse me. I skipped a page.”

Both of them looked
a sigh of relief, although you couldn’t hear anything, and settled
down again. But Chance tugged uneasily at his neckerchief. He was
starting to sweat a little.

The J. of the P. had
wound himself up again and was rolling on. “Do you, Chance, take
this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to love and to cher—to,
er—hmmm…let’s see…”

He frowned at the book.
The discrepancy between the ceremony and the circumstances was
holding him up a little.

He tried again. “Let’s
put it this way: Do you, Chance, promise to adhere to whatever
agreement you two have settled between yourselves, for as long as ye
both shall deem it necessary?”

He had imagination,
that little judge.

“Sure,” said
Chance. He didn’t.

“Do you, Meredith,
take this man to be your lawful wedded husband, promising to comply
with the terms and conditions of said agreement, for better or
worse?”

By this time I think
he’d forgotten whether he was assisting at a marriage or conspiring
at a mortgage.

“I do,” said
Meredith, quiet like before. She hadn’t.

“And now the ring!”
said the J. of the P. brightly.

“Oh,” said
Meredith, looking distressed. She looked up at Chance and over at the
Justice. “We forgot about that. Do we need to have one?”

“Well, it isn’t—so
far as I know—required by law,” said the J., “but I always
recommend it. It adds a certain stamp of—shall we say
respectability?—to the proceedings.” The Justice was evidently a
fellow who took some pride in his work. He wasn’t one for doing
things halfway.

That was when I had my
brilliant inspiration.

“Hey!” I said. I
sprang up from the witness-chair and began digging in my pockets as I
made my way up to the altar. “I’ve got something here that might
work.”

I held it out to
Meredith. It was no slouch of a ring, either. It was real gold, I
think, though a little tarnished, and the green stone in the middle
still sparkled nice after quite a while down in my pocket. It looked
a lot better out where the light could get to it. Meredith gave a
kind of “ohhhh” and took it pretty near reverently. “It’s
beautiful, Marty,” she said. “It looks old, too. It must be an
heirloom.”

“It was my
grandmother’s,” I said with satisfaction.

That touched her even
more. “Are you sure you want to give it away? No, you ought to keep
it,” she said, trying to hand it back to me.

“No, no, you go ahead
and use it. I’ve been carrying that around a long time—always
figured I’d find the right girl to give it to someday,” I said,
chuckling at my own joke.

The Justice of the
Peace shook his fat cheeks a little, like he was trying to clear a
muddled head. “I really am getting too old for this sort of thing,”
said he to himself.

I didn’t catch on
until Chance elbowed me, and then I realized I was breaking up the
J.’s field of vision, right there between the bride and groom. I
sidestepped and came up on Chance’s right. Meredith had already
slipped the ring on her finger and was sort of brooding over it. The
J. of the P. perked up again and rolled out the concluding paragraph:
“So, by the powers vested in me by the State of Missouri, I
pronounce you man and wife, to all legal intents and purposes. And
here we are on page twenty-seven again,” he added, with another
giggle.

They were beginning to
look uncomfortable again, but the ever-resourceful Justice, who was
the only one to see the humor in that particular clause of the
ceremony, came to the rescue. “Sometimes the letter of the law is
not—well, what’s required here is a tangible token of both
parties’ willingness to seal the agreement. I suppose shaking hands
would do.”

“Works to clinch most
deals,” I said.

They followed his
suggestion, and Meredith held on to Chance’s hand for a minute and
looked up into his face. “Thank you,” she said softly, and you
could see just how grateful she was.

“Don’t mention it,”
said Chance, with a rather foolish smile.

“Case dismissed,”
added the Justice of the Peace.

He shook hands with us
all around, and gave Meredith a copy of the marriage certificate—to
show the bank she hadn’t taken any shortcuts, I suppose. Once she
got that she was all in a flutter, and told Chance she wanted to go
over to the bank right away and make sure they wired her father’s
lawyer in time. So she said goodbye to the Justice and went out ahead
of us.

When we were out on the
porch, and she was out of sight, Chance drew his sleeve across his
forehead and blew out a deep breath, like a man who’s just escaped
from a hot room. The J.’s office hadn’t been particularly
stifling.

“Well, that wasn’t
so bad after all,” I said with what was supposed to be killing
irony. “Really nothing to it, is there?”

“Oh, shut up,” said
Chance, but without his usual friendliness.

Chapter
3: One Thing Leads to Another

We met Meredith coming
back from the bank, a happy uplifted look on her face. The ring on
her hand flashed when the sun hit it, and I remarked to myself that
it did go nice with her complexion. One good thing that had come out
of that day’s work, at least.

“It’s all right,”
she said. “The payment will be made as soon as the money is wired
down here. I’m so relieved; I don’t know how to thank you,
Chance.”

Then Chance said
something that sounded kind of impertinent, but made me look at him
like he was a whole lot smarter than I’d had him figured for. I
began to think that Meredith Fayett—excuse me, Meredith
Stevens—could have done worse.

He said, “If you’re
planning to sink a big chunk of that trust on the mortgage, what are
you going to live on? There won’t be much interest off what’s
left.”

Meredith nodded
thoughtfully. “I know. I talked about that with Mr. Ross when this
first came up, and I decided I’d have to choose between the ranch
and the income. I don’t want to live in the city—and I have a
little money my aunt left me. I’ll just have to make the ranch pay
from now on.”

There were a lot of
choice remarks jostling each other on my tongue about being willing
to commit matrimony just to possess yourself of a little one-horse
ranch in an indifferent shape and not overmuch cash to run it with,
but I swallowed them untasted.

“Well,” said
Chance, “if you want to improve the herd, I’d start by culling it
down and selling off the odds and ends. You could put a field or two
into a cash crop, too; that would help.”

“I’ll do it!”
said Meredith decidedly. “It sounds sensible to me. Why did you
never suggest it before, Chance? I’ve spent all this spring
wondering what more could be done with the ranch that wasn’t being
done.”

Chance looked down at
the ground and scuffed his boot in the dust. “I’m only a hired
hand, Miss Meredith—I didn’t figure I had the right to make
suggestions without your asking for them.”

“Well, I wish you
would,” said Meredith. “I’ll be glad of any suggestions you can
make. I’m going to need all the help I can get!” She gave him
another rendition of her particular smile.

“After all,” I told
Chance as we headed back to our horses, “maybe you have a little
more right to give advice now. You’re not just a hand, you’re a
husband. But oh, I forgot—not really.”

“Oh, shut up,” said
Chance in a hurry, like he thought Meredith might hear.

A few blocks along the
main street, as we rode out of town, we passed the building that
Roger Torrance called his office—which the only things he had to
support this claim were that it had four walls, a roof, a door and
some windows, as offices generally do. What’s more, Roger Torrance
himself was standing on the front porch. He was supposed to be a
surveyor, but I don’t know how he made a living at it because I
never personally knew him to do a lick of work in his life. He was a
young man with smooth black hair who spent his time going about
looking smart in suits that looked like they stepped out of a
mail-order catalogue, ties too good to be true, a hat tipped at an
angle that made you want to knock it the rest of the way off and a
charming, supercilious smile that inspired similar thoughts. When I’d
been in town with Meredith Fayett a few times before, I’d seen him
occupying her vicinity and making himself agreeable, all nods and
becks and wreathed smiles. As we passed now, he straightened up from
where he’d been artistically leaning against a post and touched his
hat to her.

“Good afternoon, Miss
Fayett,” he said.

Meredith blushed a
little. You could tell from the way he said it that Roger Torrance
knew she wasn’t (strictly speaking) Miss Fayett any longer. In a
place like Culver’s Corners everybody knows everything about you
almost before you know it yourself.

“We haven’t seen as
much of you in town lately,” said Torrance. “I hope your ranch
doesn’t keep you too busy—because the loss is ours.”

He tossed an
indifferent nod somewhere in the neighborhood between Chance and me,
like he’d just happened to notice we were there. I rode on thinking
that if I’d been the sort to carry a gun all the time, how I would
have liked to put a few slugs on the ground near Torrance’s feet
and spatter dust all on his pretty new clothes. I had an uncle who
taught me that trick once.

I saw Chance throw a
disgusted look over his shoulder at him too as we passed. But
Meredith just smiled and bowed a little after Torrance spoke to her,
and rode on. I think the main reason that kind of bird maddens decent
fellows is that they can never understand why women go for it like
they do. You’d think any girl with half a grain of sense would know
a creature like Torrance isn’t worth half the price of his fancy
outfit, but even women with more than their fair share of smarts get
taken in by his kind every day.

Where was I? Oh. Well,
by all rights that should have been the end of the whole affair, at
least until after they’d figured out how the
abandonment-and-annulment business worked, when there would have been
some more officialness and everybody would have been right back where
they started. But it wasn’t—not by a long shot. And the reasons
why not were a study in how one thing leads to another.

The first thing I
noticed was how after this, Meredith and Chance got to be friends in
an odd kind of way. I suppose being married, even if it’s just on
paper, has that effect on people. Not that things weren’t a little
awkward between them at first, of course. I’d never known Chance to
trip over his own feet before. To try and imagine what the two of
them must be thinking whenever they met made me feel almost as
muddled in the head as the old J. of the P.

But they got over that
soon enough and became downright companionable. Chance used to hang
around the house sometimes in the evenings, and Meredith would come
out to the corner of the porch with the vines on it and talk to him.
If I happened to be outside I’d hear their voices, and Meredith’s
laugh, which was as simple and pretty as the rest of her, drifting
across the yard in that easy kind of quietness you get around
sundown, and look over to see her sitting in the porch swing and
Chance leaning against the railing, looking like they were getting
along first-rate. They’d talk till far past dusk sometimes. That
muddled me even more, but if they were content, I wasn’t going to
stretch my brain trying to wrap it around the whys and wherefores.

Next came the interest
Meredith started to take in raising cattle. Not the old-fashioned way
with roundups and branding-irons, but the scientific method of
cultivating and grafting them and giving them vitamins and plotting
out their geographical bloodlines in a notebook and such. She got
books and pamphlets from the livestock societies and read up on the
subject, and invested some of the Aunt’s legacy in whitewashing the
old barns and buying stainless-steel grain buckets (all of which
probably would have horrified the Aunt if she’d been around to see
it), and she began making some right-smart little deals in new
fancy-blooded stock to help with the cultivating. I suppose this was
some of what she and Chance used to talk about in the evenings. Like
I said, he was a smart boy; he’d been to school and all that and
he’d sometimes come out with surprisingly intelligent ideas. I
think he was about the closest thing to a congruous combination of an
old-time cowpuncher and what they call the Modern Farmer that you’d
ever hope to see.

The upshot of this was
that the old Fayett place began to really wake up and stretch itself.
I’d swear the barns stood up straighter. The new coat of paint
didn’t bother its antebellum charm, but the scientific methods were
being proved in theory to make a pleasant impression on the
bank-book. You couldn’t exactly have rolled in the accumulated
wealth, but you could have sat on it comfortably. And a comfortable
chair is about all anyone can ask for. It would suit me. The new
order of things suited most everybody pretty well—I say most
because one of the hands did quit; he said there were getting to be
too many fences for his taste, but I think he really meant too many
gates because he was always forgetting to close them and Chance told
him that if he didn’t develop a taste for remembering he’d assist
his memory by—but that’s another story. The fellow left, and I
got to open and close the gates.

And what all this led
to in the end was the cattle-buying trip that Chance and I went on.
Meredith had her eye on another batch of experimental livestock, a
local recipe cooked up by another scientifically-minded rancher over
in the town of Radley Hill, quite a decent distance away, and she
wanted Chance to go and take a look at them and see if they were
worth considering or just a quack formula. I was going along mainly
to keep him company, though I fully intended to shove my oar in if I
contracted an opinion of my own. I was generally the fifth wheel to
the combine as far as all this Modern Farming was concerned, but life
around the Fayett place had been so pleasant lately that I didn’t
mind.

We got off early one
cool morning just as the sun was giving advance notice over behind
the hills. This was around three months after the Justice of the
Peace had ad-libbed his way through the wedding scene. Meredith came
running out of the house just as we had finished saddling up, with a
lunch she’d packed for us to take along. She was prettier than
ever, and looked to me like she’d grown up a little since she began
taking responsibilities into her own hands. And she was still wearing
the ring I’d given her. I don’t know if it was because she felt
she ought to, being legally married and all, or if she just
liked the ring. Maybe both.

Anyway, she gave Chance
the bag of lunch and a few last-minute instructions, which she’d
already given him before, of course, and then we said goodbye and
mounted up. It was a pretty morning, all right, with the birds
singing up in the tops of the trees and everything looking fresh and
ready to go, and we were feeling all right and ready to go ourselves.
Chance whistled a bit of a tune as we jogged out of the yard. When we
got to where the lane bent around the trees to join the road we both
turned in our saddles to look back, and Meredith was waving goodbye
to us from the porch.

Chapter
4: Hide and Seek

It’s never any use to
speculate on what might have happened if what did happen
hadn’t happened. For instance, what might have happened if Chance
and I had actually reached the laboratory of the scientific rancher.
I’ve thought about it sometimes, but never for long. Because
there’s probably nothing that could have beaten what did
happen.

We were several days
into our trip and a considerable distance from home. It was kind of a
hot day so we were taking it easy, letting our horses amble along. We
were on a flat stretch of road with a pretty steep sandy bank sloping
down on the right to something between a creek and a river; and on
our left a grassy bank sloped up into some trees with long branches
that hung down and trailed on the ground. Up ahead the road made a
long curve around to the left, and the river or whatever it was
followed it around the curve, so we could see the water twinkling
right in front of us about half a mile away.

It really was a prime
place for an ambush, but of course we weren’t thinking about that.
Having your mind too much on Modern Farming can make you forget about
the primitiveness of Missouri, where they still run to bushwhacking
on occasion. At any rate, we were going along when all of a sudden a
voice behind us says, “Hold up!”—not threateningly, but just to
let us know someone was there.

Chance and I reined in
and looked around to see who it was, but before we got a good look
several other persons came sliding down the bank out of the tree
branches, and before we knew it we were surrounded by four men on
foot, armed with various models of rifles. They closed in on us
without saying a word.

“Don’t shoot,”
said Chance, for of course we had our hands well up in the air by
this time. “We haven’t got enough money on us to make it worth
your while, boys.”

“This crew looks like
they’d plug a man for his shirt, even with the hole in it,” said
I.

But here a voice spoke
up from behind us, which we recognized as the original hold-up voice:
“Quit that foolishness. It’s you we’re after, Marty Regan, and
you know why.”